Image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash
with the now
to form a constellation.
Walter Benjamin

films, texts, drawings, sketchnotes flatform

creative direction, concept, editing giuliana prucca
graphic design, art direction
vito raimondi

size 24 x 33 cm
soft-bound without cover
pages 128 / 8 colour signatures shifting
typeface input sans
papers fedrigoni arena extra white smooth 140 gsm
dust-jacket pvc 150 micron
english / french / italian
october 2022

30 special edition copies w/ an original drawing by the artist on the dust jacket

PRESS KIT ︎︎︎

SNATURAMENTI

a workbook by FLATFORM on displacement

SNATURAMENTI is both the object and the device of the book of Flatform, a "collective artist" in the field of video and media art, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art.
The transition of various states (be they of spatial or temporal nature, geographical or historical, phenomenological or climatic) and the landscape as a complex net of connections between human beings and interspecies are the raw material of their artistic and philosophical research practice. They become the very mechanism of deconstruction and reconstruction of Flatform's films on the page, as operated by the author and curator Giuliana Prucca.
The passage from the moving image to the still image in book-format generates in itself a form of "snaturamento", literally an alteration of the nature of the original work, which, however, articulates itself in a new landscape, where the initial meanings are being displaced and are thus altering not only the narrative structure of the film but also the classical form of the book.
As a "synthetic unity of multiples", the book borrows its own functioning from Georg Simmel's visual model of the landscape, to illustrate the coexistence of the various states even during their mutation and trace them back to the permanence of a unique and comprehensive image. The film disappears in the book, but persists as an implicit source of inspiration in favor of a dynamic montage of the materials "subtracted" from Flatform's archive. Drawings, texts, diary entries, layers, frames, alternative sequences, backstage photographs, renderings of the installations ecc. join the video production, in a poetic and non-mimetic exercise of Flatform's cinematographic techniques – like compositing and audio-visual phase-shifing – in order to narrate, and undermine, natural phenomena and laws of physics, redefine concepts of time and space, modify perceptive paradigms, transform the possible into the impossible - and viceversa, creating an unstable equilibrium between the foreseeable and the unexpected, between control and chance, between obsessive precision and error, or stumbling accidents.
Being not concept, but percept book, the book uses a series of graphic artifices to reposition the reader/spectator at the center of the real experience of the landscape – and of the reading, which is not visual or contemplative, but tangible and immersive.
Being not artbook, but workbook, working tool and instruction manual, it builds and at the same time reveals the mechanics of the pages, whose intent is no longer to show, but to reactivate the act of looking to bring forth a new vision from the image's blindness.
In a territory of perpetual transitions, the book looses its cover, and thus the perimeter which defines its beginning and end. The content is externalized and, at the same time, we are directly immersed in it, with the sense that something begins – or ends – elsewhere, offscreen, or anywhere, thanks to some shifted "mobile" signatures gradually marking the end of the book and mirroring the circularity conveyed by the work of Flatform. What follows is the configuration of four different and independent versions within the same print run, which carry, in latency, the possibility of being reunited. The performativity required of the reader to recompose the fragments in their entirety gives the book an interactive and installational dimension on a par with Flatform's environmental works; it expands it, projects and verticalizes it in an exterior volume, further "denaturing" - "snaturando" – its horizontal sequential quality and displacing it in an exhibition space.

© Giuliana Prucca

published by AVARIE + LIGHT CONE éditions, Paris

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a media arts collective that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts. Their film That which is to come is just a promise has been shortlisted for the Academy Award.
flatform.it

Founded in 1982, Light Cone is a nonprofit organization whose aim is the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema in France and around the world.
Light Cone holds one of the major collections of experimental and avant-garde films in the world, consisting of around 6,200 films and videos dating from 1895 to the present day and made by 800 filmmakers.
Light Cone organises regular screenings in Paris (SCRATCH) and takes steps to safeguard the films through digitisation plans.
Since 2014, a residency program, Atelier 105, has been created for the digital post-production of experimental moving image works whereas a documentation center offers an exceptional collection of written and audiovisual documents for consultation by researchers and programmers.
Light Cone Éditions publishes a series of books on the history and aesthetics of experimental cinema.
lightcone.org